■ The maintenance of existing
equipment to bring it back to a
fully operational capability.

■ The recapitalization of equipment in which it is not only repaired, but is given new technology that has been developed since
that equipment was deployed is
installed.

■ The purchase of new equipment
to replace what was lost during
combat.

“The idea is to understand what
is coming out when, in a manner
sufficient to plan the workload for
our sources of repair — be that a
depot or a maintenance facility at
one of our camps or stations —
and then bring that materiel back
to the force in a timely manner,”
said Leonard.

Dwyer is responsible for reset
updates and planning how much
materiel is coming out of Iraq, and
how best to posture U.S. Army depots to receive the massive influx of
goods. Goods and equipment have
been flowing into Army depots for
reset mainly because of severe wear and tear, most of it
having been in theater more than five years and
exposed to sand, dust and high temperatures.

Dwyer said much of what he does is “gearing up the
depots to take that surge. We are now at three times
the workload that we were before the war, and we are
three times higher than the materiel we saw in
Vietnam,” he said. “Since the beginning of the war, we
have reset well over 1 million items in our depots, to
include aircraft. Every commodity we have can be
repaired at the depots. Last year in our industrial base,
we did $6.4 billion in revenue; revenue generated by
the repair of hundreds of thousands of items.”

AMC operates five “hard iron depots” across the
United States. The Army depots, some dating back to
1944, are commodity-oriented facilities that specialize
in resetting the wide variety of equipment deployed
today. The depots have a combined work force of about
20,000 Army employees, many of whom are wage-grade mechanics and “wrench turners.”

AMC’s depots include: Anniston, where Army and
Marine Corps combat vehicles, tanks, Stryker
armored vehicles, artillery and small arms are repaired; Corpus Christi Army Depot in Texas, for the
repair of helicopters such as Black Hawks, Apaches
and Chinooks; Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsyl-

In Southwest Asia today, AMC has oversight of hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment that it essentially tracks from the theater and back to the agency’s
Kuwait- or U.S.-based factory depots, which repair, refurbish and prepare the equipment for use in Afghanistan or
future military operations.

Leonard described AMC’s “footprint of force” in
Afghanistan, where the agency’s Field Support Brigades
ensure that the vast amounts of equipment it has repaired
or reset are in place for troops on the ground.

“The timeliness of this is really important,” Leonard
said. “Imagine [a commander] arriving at an airfield in
Afghanistan. They get acclimated, then one day within
a timeline dictated by a maneuver commander, a logistician shows up and takes him to the backside of an
airfield and there are 100 MRAPs [Mine Resistant
Ambush Protected vehicles], there are machine guns,
night-vision goggles, radios — all prepared for that
brigade combat team to draw its equipment. We do the
same thing for the Marine Expeditionary Force.”

One of AMC’s chief functions involves what happens to equipment when it comes home, at which time
the agency looks at the “rolling stock” of all of the
weapons and goods and decides how it will be reset.

Dwyer said the resetting of military equipment is
defined in one of three ways: